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Outstanding
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The New York Times Janet Maslin
In the end he is his own best advertisement, with a lifetime’s worth of stinging observations and sharp, combative insights to his credit. Add vanity, hubris and audacity on the same scale, and you have a man whose new memoir is unmissable. Surely he would be the first to agree.
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Favorable
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The New York Times Book Review Christopher Hitchens
It is better to take up this book, like its predecessors, for the reflections on writers and writing, and on the necessity for voracious and polymathic reading.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Robert Douglas-Fairhurst
In some hands such stories could sound merely pompous, ringing with the sound of names being dropped from a great height, but not in Vidal's case. These are the friendships and rivalries that helped to shape his career, so it's generous and touching that he should want to bring them together at the last: a fitting finale to a life that was always navigated by the stars.
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Favorable
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Daily Telegraph Nigel Farndale
This is a lighter, wittier read than Vidal's rather self-consciously literary memoir Palimpsest published in 1995 – he left himself at the end of that one in the year 1964, when he was 39 – though it is no less elegantly written. His timing, like his ear for euphony, never fails him.
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Favorable
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Sydney Morning Herald Dennis Altman
Point to Point is most effective when he writes, simply and movingly, of Howard's decline, revealing a Vidal rarely seen in public.
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Favorable
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New York Review Of Books Larry McMurtry
Those passages, like those of some of the other writers about our great recent dead, really can't be improved upon. Death trumps gossip; death trumps gab, no matter how brilliant the gabber, and all the more so when there's fifty-three years of shared experience packed into it. The death of a long-loved friend deserves its own tone, and this Gore Vidal provides, and yet I find myself wishing that the death of Howard Austen chapter could have been printed separately from the gossip and the gab.
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Favorable
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The Spectator Nicholas Haslam
In this navigation round the shores and shoals of his later life, Vidal nails up his truest colours. His map is the world, the world his oyster; and fortunately, he's no clam. He's the heart of this book, although he writes, 'I have never been my own subject.' That's true, up to a point, but a subject so sardonic, so bold and vital can hardly fail to be its own cynosure, however spotlit the cast he assembles around him. [18 Nov 2006]
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Favorable
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TLS: The Times Literary Supplement James M. Murphy
Auster's dignity and courage in the last days, and his friend's heartbreak in witnessing them, turn these pages of the memoir into literature, reminding us of the respect we all owe to grief and those who endure it. Whatever the book as a whole may lack in purpose or direction, it finds in these pages a voice that speaks to the heart.
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Favorable
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Booklist Brad Hooper
Certainly one of the best treats of the book is that Vidal has known many famous people, whom he mentions with a genuine interest in sharing what about them interested him. And Vidal always can be appreciated for his beautiful prose style alone. [1 Sept 2006, p.6]
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Favorable
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Boston Globe Amanda Heller
Bereaved and creaky of knee at 81, Vidal intimates throughout this shrewdly free-associative memoir that he may be firing his parting shot.
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Favorable
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Chicago Sun-Times Natalie Danford
Also lovely are the moments when Vidal turns his attention to himself. He writes especially expressively about the death of his partner of 53 years, Howard Auster, in 2003. Vidal skillfully weaves together Auster's last days at Cedars-Sinai Hospital in Los Angeles, his own feelings about aging, and readings about death and grief.
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Troy Patterson
The volume is a disjointed contraption built to salute old movies, reheat ancient gossip, and run bizarre errands -- pinning, for instance, the JFK assassination on the Mob. It's random. Nevertheless, the story sings when Vidal turns to memorializing his late partner, Howard Austen.
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Mixed
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Houston Chronicle Steven E. Alford
Vidal has taken the freedom the memoir offers but has delivered a text that is directionless, lumpy and disconnected. However, if you approach the book as a series of postprandial stories by a wicked, witty gossip, you won't be disappointed.
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Mixed
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Kirkus Reviews
Though Vidal's memories from encounters in DC, New York, Hollywood and elsewhere remain intact, the wit that animates the best of his oeuvre is largely absent, leaving a voice at best affecting and at worst hectoring. [1 Sept 2006, p.894]
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Mixed
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Library Journal Gina Kaiser
Vidal feels an affinity for the great memoirist and essayist Michel de Montaigne, and in his free-flowing style one can see the similarity. But for an entire book, it grows tedious to keep losing the thread. [1 Nov 2006, p.78]
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Mixed
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Publishers Weekly
In short, the memoir is a perfect encapsulation of Vidal's outsized personality -- and readers' reactions will be determined by how they already feel about him. [4 Sept 2006, p.47]
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Mixed
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The Nation Michael Wood
"Nonlinear lives make for awkward biographies," Vidal writes, and they make for rather rambling memoirs. If you are determined not to (or are perhaps unable to) explore or explain yourself, you can only shift among the points your memory or your current reflections tell you are interesting. This is bound to be an erratic affair for anyone.
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Mixed
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The Globe And Mail [Toronto] Ray Robertson
It's not nearly as well written as its predecessor -- in many ways, it isn't even strictly a memoir -- but it is almost as enjoyable. As perhaps the final brick to be added to chez Vidal, it's not an entirely inappropriate concluding act.
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Mixed
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The Independent Christopher Bigsby
Perhaps the best that can be said for Point to Point Navigation is that it is a testament to the depth of his commitment to Austen, his companion of 53 years. This is not only because at one stage it contains a moving testament to their relationship (non-sexual, and for that reason, he curiously suggests, lasting) but because the drifting inconsequence of much of the rest is perhaps best seen as a reflection of a life that seems suddenly to have lost much of its purpose.
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Mixed
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Washington Post Louis Bayard
By book's end, Vidal has dragged us perhaps to a few too many dinners, but he remains a peerlessly entertaining companion, especially when he's working in miniature.
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Unfavorable
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Los Angeles Times James Marcus
When one of our greatest living critics reprints a Publishers Weekly precis of a book rather than summarizing it himself, it's really time to throw in the towel. Shame on the publisher for wheeling this subpar product into the marketplace. [5 Nov 2006, p.R3]
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Unfavorable
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Salon Allen Barra
Unfortunately, this raises two questions, neither one of which I have a satisfactory answer for. First, either you don't care about Vidal, in which case why would you want to read these books, and second, if you have followed Vidal over the years, why would you want to hear all this material rehashed?
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Unfavorable
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San Francisco Chronicle Michael S. Roth
Vidal brags in Point to Point Navigation that he has never really needed a strong editor in his long career. Alas, he needed one here.
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